Is much of college wasted on the young? What would a great university education mean to you now?

Now thousands of adult learners are finding out, through college courses by top teachers captured on audiotape, videotape, CD, or DVD for enjoyment in your home or car.

How often have you looked back on your college learning years and thought about how much more that time would mean to you now? What if you could spend each day in the company of great minds, ideas, events, and insights?

For more than a decade, The Teaching Company has been recording the finest lecturing university professors in the world in order to make a vast curriculum in the arts and sciences available to everyone. It adds up to over 1,800 hours of material in literature, philosophy, history, fine arts, and the sciences.

If you listened to or watched just one 30-minute lecture each day you would, in one month, complete what would be about 500 pages of course material in written form, roughly two full-sized books. In a year, 6,000 pages of material would be yours. In five years, you'd have absorbed more than a five-foot shelf of the finest university education in the world. And it need never end we add hundreds of hours of new material each year.

Oh, and there is no homework and there are no exams. The joy of learning would become a treasured part of every day and the centerpiece of a life well-lived.

"The Teaching Company ... has become a force in adult education by distributing lectures by professors from some of the nation's leading universities."

--The New York Times

Great Professors

Who are the Great Teachers? They are gifted scholars, explainers, enthusiasts, communicators--and, yes, entertainers. Everyone who has ever experienced the sheer pleasure of learning from just one great teacher knows what we mean.

There are approximately 425,000 college professors in America. In over a decade of searching, we have selected barely 100 to make The Great Courses. Why only these? Because we seek out only those professors who will make your time in the world of ideas a daily pleasure.

How do we find them? Each year we travel the country--Harvard to Stanford, UCLA to UNC--to watch hundreds of top-rated professors from America's best colleges and universities, in search of the finest.